Thursday, March 29, 2012

Mapping the brain’s superhighways

Mapping the brain’s superhighways: Scientists led by Van Wedeen of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston used a scanning technique called diffusion magnetic resonance imaging that detects the direction of traffic flow along white matter tracts, the brain’s information superhighways. The scans revealed that these brain signals form a grid, made up of parallel and perpendicular tracts woven together into curved sheets.

This grid is a general feature of primate brains, Wedeen and colleagues report in the March 30 Science. Brains of rhesus monkeys, owl monkeys, marmosets and prosimian galagos contained similar geometric patterns to those found in human volunteers, suggesting the grid’s deep evolutionary roots.

1 comment:

  1. Origin Of Nerved Organisms

    From
    http://universe-life.com/2012/02/03/universe-energy-mass-life-compilation/

    Life’s evolution, mass formats self-replication:

    RNA nucleotides Genes (organisms) to RNA and DNA genomes (organisms) to mono-cellular to multicellular organisms.

    Individual mono-cells to cooperative mono-cells communities, “cultures”.

    Mono-cells cultures to neural systems, then to nerved multicellular organisms.


    Dov Henis
    (comments from 22nd century)

    ReplyDelete